


Cycle

by shalako



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Baby Henry, Eventual Romance, F/M, Insomnia, M/M, Milah is abusive, Multi, Nightmares, Spinner!Rumple, Swanfire is a side pairing, anti-milah, eventual poly - Freeform, roommates au, starving artist AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2017-03-30
Packaged: 2018-07-15 09:59:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7217953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shalako/pseuds/shalako
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Gold finally leaves his wife, he has nowhere to go except his 22-year-old son's apartment in New York. But soon Neal has a baby to take care of, and he and Gold need a little help with rent. Roommates AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Moving In

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is kinda slow-burn compared to most of mine so hopefully someone actually reads it lol

“Dad, seriously, I can handle it,” Neal said. “Go upstairs.”

He yanked on the cardboard box, wishing he had an arm free so he could pry Gold’s fingers off it. But Gold was too stubborn to let go.

“It’s my stuff,” he said. “I can carry it on my own.”

“My apartment’s on the fourth floor!” Neal said. He tugged again, harder this time, and Gold was forced to let go before he lost balance and fell on his face.

“I’ll gather the other boxes, then,” he said, recovering quickly. Neal was so exasperated he almost dropped the box to pull out his own hair.

“No, you  _ won’t _ ,” he said. “I’m serious. It’s only three boxes - just come upstairs with me and you can start unpacking while I’m bringing everything up.”

Gold scowled, glancing back at his car. He’d driven down from a small town in the countryside - a two-hour drive - and really didn’t look forward to unpacking everything. He’d  _ just _ packed it, for God’s sake.

Gold wondered, not for the first time, if this was really going to be his living situation from now on. To go from a decent-sized house in the country to an apartment in New York City was … unsettling, to say the least. But Milah wanted the house, and there was something weirdly attractive about moving to the city, where people on the street didn’t know Gold - and, more importantly, didn’t know who he was married to.

He turned around, realized Neal was waiting for an answer.

“Right,” Gold said. “Okay. But I could always just use the elevator …”

“These boxes are bigger than you,” Neal said dismissively. He shifted the box he was holding - it was the largest of the three, stuffed with all the clothes Gold had deemed worthy of the move.

“I already carried them from the house to the car,” Gold pointed out, but Neal seemed determined not to listen. He trudged into the lobby, leaving Gold to follow.

Neal’s apartment building was dark and grimy, with hardly any natural light getting in. Gold had to dodge more than one mysterious puddle on his way to the elevator, which was so old he feared it might fall down the shaft with them inside.

It creaked and shook as it ascended and Gold found himself gripping his cane tightly, stealing glances at his son. If Neal noticed the elevator’s poor shape, he didn’t show it. Perhaps he’d grown used to it; he’d been living here for almost three months, after all.

The elevator let them out on the fourth floor; Neal led the way to an unassuming door at the end of the hallway. The number plate had peeled off and Neal had replaced it with a Post-It note reading 432.

“Key’s in my pocket,” Neal grunted. Gold fished it out and hurried inside, holding the door open for his son. Neal took a few stumbling steps through the living room to the second bedroom, which was being used as storage for Neal’s still-packed clothes and art supplies.

“There we go,” Neal said, setting the box down with a thump. “I’ll be right up with the rest.”

He pushed past Gold and disappeared into the hallway, leaving Gold to unpack. 

Gold looked around the room - his new bedroom. It was, sadly, about the same size as the one he’d shared with Milah for the past twenty-six years. The bed was a bit smaller, though - Milah had wanted a king, which had been a little out of their price range at the time, so she’d settled on a queen. Gold guessed that this bed was a full; it was covered in dusty blue sheets and an old quilt that Gold himself had gifted to Neal when the young man left for college.

Gold sat down on the bed and pulled the box closer. It was stuffed with all his nicest clothes - flannel shirts from Wal-Mart, some ratty old jeans, and a collection of secondhand sweaters, all of them a little too big.

Or a lot too big. There was one - worn  _ only _ around the home - which was so long it reached Gold’s knees.

Gold sighed and started pulling every item out one by one, careful not to ruin the folding; he was too tired to fold them again. He was still working on it when Neal tromped back in with the two remaining boxes. He slid them across the floor to Gold, who just managed to move his feet before they were crushed.

“I’m gonna order Chinese,” Neal said. “You want the usual?”

Gold looked up briefly, his hands automatically opening one of the new boxes. “Yeah, that’s fine,” he said.

“Okay,” said Neal, but he didn’t leave. For a while, Gold ignored him, taking files of legal papers out of the box and laying them next to him on the bed. He could feel Neal’s eyes burning into him, and dread was starting to seep through his veins; Neal was about to try and have a talk.

“Dad?” Neal said finally, sounding ten years younger. Gold looked up, his eyebrows raised in a carefully-practiced neutral expression. “I’m glad you left her,” Neal said. “I was really worried about you. Thought she might …” He gave a jerky shrug, his voice becoming gruff again. “I dunno - I’m gonna go order that Chinese food.”

He hurried out, clipping his shoulder on the doorframe. Gold sat frozen on the edge of the bed, still hunched over, his hands still inside the cardboard box.

Neal had been worried about him. Neal knew that his parents’ marriage was - Gold’s mind stuttered, silently pushing away from the word ‘abusive’ - a bad relationship. Well, of course he would - Neal wasn’t stupid, and he’d grown up in the house with them. It would be impossible to not notice something was wrong.

Gold hung his head, cheeks burning with a sudden wave of embarrassment. His son was worried about him. No child should ever have to worry about his parents - especially Neal, who had trouble enough as it was. 

Gold let out a long, slow breath and started looking through the box again, not really seeing anything at first. He pulled out his immigrations papers and a thick stack of drawings Neal had done as a child. Gold hadn’t thought to grab Neal’s high school paintings off the walls before he left, something he now regretted deeply. Milah had never appreciated those paintings enough; she was so critical about them, even to Neal’s face - though, of course, that was only in the privacy of their own home. In public, Milah was the proudest mother alive.

But Gold had always been in awe of Neal’s paintings. They were nightmarish but not vulgar, creepy but innately human. That had been during Neal’s Tim Burton stage; Gold personally found his son’s art style much more sophisticated than Burton’s, though. He was glad to have  _ something _ from Neal’s childhood, even if it was just doodles.

Gold gathered Neal’s old drawings (and report cards, and photos, and newspaper clippings) and placed them inside the desk to his left. He shoved all the legal papers back into the box and turned to the third box, pulling it open with care.

Inside were dozens of plastic boxes, some small and some large, each containing a paper automaton or model. The heaviest thing in the box was a graph-paper notebook at the bottom, filled with pencil-drawn designs. Gold had been able to save only his most recent creations; the older ones - wooden toys dating back to Neal’s infancy - were hidden away in the attic, which Gold couldn’t access on his own.

Gold deliberated on the plastic boxes for a while; eventually, he slipped the notebook out from under them and placed it on the desk, leaving the automata boxed up. He could move them later.


	2. This One Summer

It was twenty minutes before Gold accepted that his son had no kitchenware. There was a giant stack of paper plates on top of the microwave, red solo cups tossed onto the top of the fridge, and bags of disposable forks and spoons stuffed into a drawer. Gold saw all of those fairly early on, but he didn’t stop searching for  _ actual _ plates until after Neal started on his second helping of Chinese food.

Gold slid a portion of slimy beef and broccoli onto a paper plate so thin he was sure the bottom would fall out before he made it to the table. He sat down across from Neal, picking at the food. Gold hadn’t eaten since he left Milah the day before; he’d gathered his stuff and gone driving around for hours, until he finally got too tired and checked into a motel.

Still, his stomach felt … not quite full, but full enough that he could still throw up, if he forced food down his throat. Gold chased a piece of broccoli around with his fork, pretending not to notice Neal’s concerned stare.

When Neal opened his mouth - no doubt for another awkward conversation - Gold cut him off.

“How’s your comic going?” he asked. Neal closed his mouth, then opened it again, blinking rapidly. Eventually, he seemed to decide Gold’s conversation topic was better than whatever he was going to say.

“Webcomic,” he said. Gold glanced up from his plate, checking to see if Neal was serious; Gold had never heard of a ‘webcomic’ before and for just a moment, he connected it to spiders instead of the Internet.

“Webcomic?” he said eventually. Neal nodded, his mouth stuffed with orange chicken.

“Yeah, it’s like - like a comic book,” he said, “except you post, like one page a day on a website.”

Gold’s eyebrows flew up. “You post a page a  _ day _ ?” he said. Neal flushed, gesturing a little with his fork.

“Well, I don’t, personally,” he said. “But some people do.”

“Oh.” Gold considered that and decided it was better that Neal not post daily - he imagined the artists who did so probably never left their homes. “Well, what’s it about? I know you told Milah, but --”

“She didn’t tell you?” Neal guessed, not seeming surprised. He didn’t wait for Gold’s nod. “Okay, so the main character is -- well, I should start with the genre, the genre is -- well, have you ever read  _ This One Summer _ ?”

Gold didn’t answer; it took him a while to realize that  _ This One Summer _ was the name of a book and not just Neal beginning yet another new sentence.

“Er, no,” he said. Neal nodded sagely, as if he already knew Gold would say “no.”

“Okay, so  _ This One Summer _ is like, this really good, award-winning graphic novel, okay, and it’s all about this girl coming of age during the summer, at a lakehouse with her mom. And maybe her dad but I think her dad left, I don’t know.”

“Alright,” Gold said. He was imagining the storyline as Neal might tell it - perhaps with a male protagonist instead of a young woman, and perhaps with the mother leaving instead of the father.

“Here,” said Neal, getting out his phone. He typed something in and then turned the screen so Gold could see. Neal had brought up a picture of the book’s cover; as Gold watched, he scrolled through scan after scan of pages from the book itself. The artwork was decent to look at, Gold decided, but it was nothing as good as what Neal could do.

“Alright,” Gold said again. Neal put his phone away.

“So that’s kind of the same genre as my webcomic,” he said. “It’s like, slice-of-life, you know.”

Gold felt immensely relieved to hear the word “slice-of-life.” At last, something he understood.

“So my story,” Neal said excitedly, “is about this kid, okay, named Jason, and he’s like, thirteen years old and -- okay, it’s gonna sound a lot like I plagiarized _This One Summer_ , but I promise I came up with my idea before I read the book, okay?”

Gold nodded graciously. Neal had always had a habit of copying the things he liked for a little while; it helped him grow as an artist, so Gold never pointed it out. He figured it was probably normal.

“Okay,” Neal said, “so Jason’s dad --”

“You know, your mother wanted to name you Jason for a while,” Gold said, the thought just occurring to him. Neal gave him a pained look.

“Dad, I’m trying to tell you about the story.”

“Sorry.”

“Like I was saying,” said Neal, “Jason’s dad just left his wife - cuz she’s like, a Class-A bitch - and he and Jason are staying, like permanently, in a rented room in this one guy’s old Victorian house, okay? So they’ve got, like, all these kooky neighbors staying in the house with them, and the owner of the house - this Nigerian guy - just up and leaves America one night, so actually none of them are paying rent and they’re just waiting for someone to come and evict them.”

“Okay,” Gold said. “Sounds good so far.”

“Well, that’s pretty much it,” said Neal, leaning back in his chair. “That's the plot. Right now I’m on this storyline about how Jason and his dad go dumpster-diving, and all Jason’s friends at school find out and make fun of him for it. It’s slice-of-life, but just of a kinda  _ unusual _ life, you know?”

Gold nodded, a pleasant smile on his face, but he felt like he’d just been stabbed through the heart with a particularly sharp icicle. It was the dumpster-diving comment that got him. He and Neal had never had an especially wealthy life, and when Neal was young - around eight or nine - Milah had left them for a while, leaving them especially poor.

They’d gone dumpster-diving. Gold hadn’t seen anything wrong with it; it was something he’d done with his father when he was a kid, so it just seemed natural. When times were hard, one could always look through trash in the rich part of town, searching dumpsters and junkyards for abandoned furniture in good enough condition to re-sell.

As a child, Gold had loved doing this with his father. He loved getting out of school and going on walks around the city; the fact that he was stealing other people’s trash had never really affected him. Neal hadn’t felt the same way; even as an eight-year-old he’d been mortified, and Gold had longed to do it on his own, but by then, he was walking with a cane, and he needed Neal’s help.

Neal had never mentioned his friends making fun of him, though. Gold stared down at his plate, feeling sick. Why was Neal always so stoic about everything? He didn’t get it from his parents - Milah wore her emotions on her sleeve, using them to get what she wanted, and Gold cried so easily and often that it was embarrassing. But Neal - it was entirely possible he’d been bullied as a second-grader, and Gold had simply never noticed.

_ It’s just a storyline _ , Gold told himself forcefully.  _ People say write what you know. Neal’s just taking a neutral experience and turning it into a sad one to make it more interesting; if the bullying was based on real life, he wouldn’t mention it to you like this. That’s not what Neal does. That's what  _ Milah _ does. _

“You gonna eat your food?” Neal asked, pointing his fork at Gold’s plate. Gold blinked up at him, uncomprehending for a moment, before sliding the plate over to Neal. “Awesome,” Neal said. He dug in, speaking around a mouth full of broccoli. “So how come you left Mom this time? Anything I should know?”

Gold shrugged, his mouth dry. For a moment, he considered brushing the question off. But it wouldn’t exactly be fair, since he was now living in his son’s apartment.

“We, uh, had a bit of a row,” he said. Neal paused mid-chew, his eyes skittering over every section of exposed skin on Gold, searching for bruises. “A row, not a fistfight,” Gold sighed.

“I know,” Neal said defensively, “I just … ugh, go on.”

“That’s all,” Gold said. Neal shot him a look usually reserved for very small, misbehaving children.

“No, that’s  _ not _ all,” he said. “What were you fighting about?”

“Nothing,” Gold said. “It was just … a regular fight. Over nothing.”

“Over n--”

“I was tired, she was …” Gold hesitated, trying to think of anything that would make Milah mad but wouldn’t make her sound like a comic book villain. “She was … hungry.”

“Are you trying to tell me you left Mom cuz she was hangry?” Neal said with a scoff. “You wouldn’t even leave her that one time she  _ stabbed _ you.”

“I don’t know what that word means,” said Gold gruffly, scowling at the table.

“Stabbed?”

“No,” said Gold. “The other one. Hangry.”

Neal stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. “It means … it’s like when you’re so hungry that you start getting pissed at everything. And then as soon as you eat, you’re happy again. It’s a mix between hungry and angry.”

“Oh.”

“It’s from the Snickers commercial. I think.”

Gold nodded. He was still staring at the table, his arms crossed, wondering if it would be worth it to point out that Milah hadn't stabbed him _badly_ , and that she'd been kind of drunk when she did so. Neal sighed.

“You still haven’t told me why you were fighting,” he said. Gold could feel his face forming into a glare; he tried hard to keep his expression neutral, but knew he was failing. The truth was, he hadn’t left Milah for any big, dramatic reason - it was, in fact, something that had happened twice before; the first time he’d been mad, but he hadn’t said anything. The second time, he’d stuttered out an angry sentence before getting shut down. But something in him had snapped this time. It felt almost silly to have left for the reason he did.

“Dad,” Neal said, stretching his arm across the table. He couldn’t quite reach Gold. “You can tell me anything, okay? I’m not gonna take her side - I’ve known better than to take her side since I was _six_.”

“She’s not always wrong,” Gold muttered. Neal didn’t answer; he stayed bent over the table, his arm outstretched, reaching for his dad. Offering comfort.

Over what, exactly?

“It’s stupid,” Gold sighed. “She … I was working on a new automaton. You remember that character you used to draw? The magical knight?”

Neal huffed out a brief laugh. “Uh, yeah,” he said. “I mean, it was … it was just a whitewashed version of Mulan, to be honest.”

“Nonsense,” Gold said instantly, his eyebrows furrowing. “Mulan’s not a knight. Or magical.”

“Right,” said Neal. “Whatever - you were building an automaton of her?”

“Yeah,” said Gold. “When she opened her right hand, these blue strips of paper would fly up, like --”

“Like when she conjures up spirits in the story,” Neal said, smiling.

“Right.”

“Dad, I seriously can’t believe you remember that.”

“Of course I do,” said Gold, pretending to be offended. “It was a great story.”

“You don’t even  _ like _ comics,” Neal said, shaking his head. 

“I like _yours_.”

Neal shook his head again, but he was smiling widely. “Go on with the story,” he said. Gold took a steadying breath.

“Well,” he said, “I was just about finished with it, and your mother was getting … kind of irritated with me. Because I hadn’t been paying her much attention. So I went out, and … well, I got her flowers, and a new cue stick for billiards, and … uh, she got angry with me.”

“Shocking,” Neal said.

“She said she’d told me before that she didn’t like flowers,” Gold said. “But I’m fairly sure that last time she said she didn’t like roses, only daisies. So that’s what I got her this time. And when I challenged her on what she’d actually said, she changed the subject, and said if I hadn’t been working on the automaton all the time instead of paying attention to her, I might know basic details about my wife. Like whether or not she likes flowers.”

“Mom _loves_ flowers,” said Neal indignantly. “She used to complain all the time that you didn’t get them for her often enough.”

“I know,” Gold said, heartened a bit by the fact that someone else remembered, too. “Anyway, I-I kept arguing with her--”

“You don’t normally do that.”

“I know," said Gold, his cheeks turning red. "And she got … especially pissed, I think, because I wasn’t backing down. Like usual. So she …” Gold shrugged jerkily, trying to act casual. “She, uh, grabbed the knight, and … well, she burnt it.”

There was a brief silence. Neal looked like he’d been punched in the stomach.

“How long had you been working on it?” he asked. Gold found himself chewing on his thumbnail.

“A month or so,” he said. “Two if you count designing it. I wanted it to be really good, better than my old ones. Because -- well, the story you wrote was excellent, so --”

“And she just … burned it?” Neal asked. He was blatantly horrified, which Gold felt was a bit of an overreaction, even if he himself had been so angry over it that he left. “How?”

“With her lighter,” Gold said. He shifted uncomfortably. "She put it in the woodstove."

“She burned one of my books once like that,” Neal said darkly, glaring at nothing in particular. “Remember?”

“Your Harry Potter book,” Gold said. “Yes.”

“And my toys, too, when I was ten. The stuffed animals. I just came home one day and they were all gone. She said I was too old for them.”

Gold felt a pang of guilt at that; he still remembered coming home from work to find Neal crying in his bedroom and Milah sitting in the kitchen with a cigarette, pissed off at Neal for ‘overreacting’ and self-righteous about what she’d done. It was all Gold’s fault; he’d been sent out for groceries the day before, and instead of buying Milah some triple-sec like he’d promised, he’d bought Neal a new toy. Tigger, from Winnie the Pooh.

They’d had a huge row over it; Milah thought it was unnatural for a boy Neal’s age to still like stuffed animals. She worried that he was gay - something that especially annoyed Gold, who was bi and would personally be very happy if his son turned out gay. Gold argued in Neal’s favor, pointing out that Neal used the stuffed toys to bring his stories to life. He’d heard Neal acting out more than one creative storyline with them - murder mysteries, espionage, high fantasy. For a child, especially one as inventive as Neal, it was a devastating loss.

“I don’t know why I got so angry at her,” Gold said quietly. “Normally, I …”

Neal watched him, waiting for him to finish the sentence. But in the end, Gold just shook his head. 

“Tell me more about your webcomic,” he said.


	3. Phone Call #1

Gold jolted awake, his heart racing, to the horrible noise of buzzing in his room. His first thought -  _ hornets _ \- was replaced by the more rational realization that his phone was vibrating on the desk. 

Fear turned into relief and back into fear again. Milah had killed herself - no, not possible. Milah would only consider suicide if it would spite someone - and she didn’t care enough about Gold to spite him. 

He slid out of bed and leaned on the desk, glancing at the caller ID.

Speak of the devil.

With a mounting feeling of dread, Gold flipped the phone open and held it to his ear. “Hello?”

“Ian,” Milah said, her voice crisp and annoyed. “Where are you?”

He glanced at the clock nearby. “Milah, it’s two a.m.”

“Oh, pardon  _ me _ ,” said Milah. “I’m  _ worried _ about you, asshole.  _ Where are you? _ ”

Gold sighed, rubbing sleep from his eyes. He turned around so all his weight wasn’t resting on his wrists. “You didn’t care where I was going when I left,” he said. Milah responded so loudly that Gold nearly lost his hearing.

“I was angry, Ian! You hurt me a  _ lot _ that day! I’ve been crying non-stop, I keep thinking about what you said--”

Gold closed his eyes, forcing back a sharp retort. He always started these arguments the same way - angry, indignant, shocked. And he always ended them by crying. The only exception was two days ago, when the argument ended with him leaving. And, well, maybe also some crying, but that was later.

“I didn’t hurt you,” Gold said calmly. “You’re saying I did so I’ll feel guilty. You want me to apologize and come back, so you’re manipulating me.”

There was an agonizing pause. When Milah spoke, her voice was low and shaking … and so convincingly distraught that Gold almost broke. 

“Do you _ever_ think before you say things like that, Ian? I’ve spent my _whole_ _life_ trying to be a better person than--”

“Than your parents, yes,” said Gold. He didn’t continue for a while, appalled by the way his voice had broken on ‘yes.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and glanced at the clock again. They’d been talking for two minutes; Gold felt weary, like they’d been talking for hours.

He couldn’t do this. He couldn’t stand up to her tonight. The only thing he could do was run away.

“I need to sleep, Milah,” he said. And then, with whatever bravery he could muster, “Don’t call me again. Please.”

He flipped the phone shut before she could respond and set it down on the desk, his chest constricting painfully. It was hard to breathe; Gold recognized the beginning of a panic attack, but didn’t even have time to think before the phone started vibrating again.

Gold fumbled with the phone, almost dropped it - he’d seen Neal ignore calls on his smart phone by pressing a red button, but he had no idea how to do that on  _ his _ phone. He waited, agonizingly, until it stopped ringing, then opened it and turned it off for the night.

Gold stayed there, leaning on the desk, for so long that his knees locked and he nearly fainted. He lowered himself into bed with care, heart still aching, and closed his eyes when they suddenly turned wet. He sighed into his pillow; the voice inside his head was slow and gentle, repeating the words,  _ calm down, calm down, calm down _ .

He sniffed, the tears drying up, unshed. His mind slowly emptied, pulling him back down into darkness.

Gold had nearly drifted off to sleep when he heard Neal’s phone ringing next door. He jolted awake again, heart pounding. There was a rustling of blankets from Neal’s room, a pause as the ringing cut off, and a muzzy, “Hullo?”

Gold held his breath, his fingers curled in the sheets. He was so tense his muscles hurt.

“No,” said Neal. “He’s not here.”

Gold didn’t relax. He waited, listening for more.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” said Neal, annoyed. “Mom, I’m trying to sleep … Yeah. Goodnight.”

And silence.

Several minutes passed; Gold lay absolutely still, listening as Neal settled back into bed and started snoring.

Gold wouldn’t be sleeping that night.


	4. Tupperware

Gold gave up on sleep when six a.m. hit and light started streaming through the window. He got up with a groan, his leg unusually stiff; Gold paced in a circle, leaning on his cane and taking short, easy steps to warm it up. It got a little less sore, but the improvement was barely noticeable.

  
He’d take a shower and start on breakfast while Neal was still asleep. In Neal’s first year of college, he’d sent a card home saying nothing compared to Dad’s homemade French toast and scrambled eggs. Gold had been so proud he’d put the card on the fridge. And after breakfast, when Neal was working on his comic, Gold could go out looking for a new job.

  
He started humming, reaching toward the desk for his painkillers. It was then that he noticed the phone and anxiety started eating his stomach again. Gold deliberated for a moment, then turned the phone on, waiting patiently as it started up.

  
He had sixteen missed phone calls. All from Milah.

  
Gold let out a shaky breath and turned the phone off again, shoving it inside the top drawer. He’d ask Neal how to block Milah’s number later. For now …

  
He grabbed a fresh set of clothes and headed into the bathroom, making a mental list of things he’d need to buy today. A towel, since Neal apparently only had one. A new toothbrush - he hadn’t thought to grab his when he left home. Socks - he hadn’t packed any socks.

  
Gold glanced around the cramped bathroom, trying to decide where to put his clothes. After much thought, he took the towel off the rack and draped it over the curtain rod, then put his clothes over the towel rack. Hopefully, the towel wouldn’t get too wet as he showered. He threw his pajamas on the floor as he took them off, and stepped into the tub.

  
The tub was sea green - or at least, had been once. Now, it was covered in enormous patches of rusty red. Gold hesitated to touch the porcelain with his bare feet, but the red patches weren’t rough - they were just as smooth as the green bits. The same rusty color was creeping up the white walls.

  
Frowning, Gold examined the faucet. It was in the same condition - was this paint? Had Neal been painting in the bathtub? Gold wished he could rule that out, but it had happened before.

  
Hesitantly, he turned on the water. It came out lukewarm, with horribly low water pressure. Gold kept waiting for it to get warmer, but it never did. He ended the shower after five minutes, shivering and even more miserable than before.

  
The towel wasn’t wet, at least. Gold dressed quickly, eager to feel warm again. He hurried out into the kitchen and started searching for Neal’s pots and pans. It took him only a minute before he remembered, with a sinking feeling, that Neal didn’t even own plates. He looked around the kitchen, hoping against hope that he would at least find an oven somewhere. But no - Neal’s only cooking device was a microwave.

  
Gold sighed, searching the fridge for more options. He could still cook bacon in a microwave, though he wasn’t sure what to do about eggs. Neal didn’t have any bowls …

  
Gold headed back into his bedroom, grabbing his wallet off the desk and his phone out of the drawer. He had thirty-seven dollars; Gold chewed on his lower lip for a moment, running through his options. He shoved the wallet and phone into his pockets and moved quietly through the apartment, searching for a pen and paper.

  
He needed to make a list. Neal was always either working or exercising, and he needed three meals a day, just like when he was a kid. After all, he was only twenty-two. He hadn’t finished growing yet.

  
For breakfast … Gold thought over the options, unsure of the prices. Apple-and-cinnamon oatmeal was only $2 a box if you got Walmart-brand instead of Quaker Oats. Generic breakfast bars were a little bit cheaper, if he remembered right. But they weren’t always filling … He could get a pound of apples for around the same price, but with the two of them, that would only be two breakfasts, and he still had to figure out a menu for lunch and dinner.

  
Gold closed his eyes for a moment, going through a mental list of recipes. He and Milah hadn’t always had a full set of kitchenware, but they had always had plates, bowls, and a crockpot - Milah’s parents had seen to it. Gold could think of a few cheap meals he could convert over to microwave-only, but he’d still need bowls. And how much did bowls cost at Wal-Mart? He hadn’t had to buy new glassware since Neal moved out - and Neal had broken things so frequently that Gold had stopped buying dishes anywhere but at garage sales.

  
Gold wrote down, at the very top of the list, _1 microwaveable bowl - $5?_ He hesitated, chewing the pen, and then wrote down _breakfast bars - $2._ They wouldn’t last as long as the oatmeal, but they’d be better than the apples. And if he had a microwaveable bowl …

  
_1 can cream of mushroom - $2_   
_1 can cream of chicken - $2_   
_1 box minute rice - $4 or $5  
1 can chicken breast - $3_

  
That would do them for dinner for a few days. Gold nodded to himself, tallying up the total so far: about twenty dollars, with tax. So he was still good for some lunchmeat and bread - and maybe pickles, since Neal didn’t have any - and he could -

  
Gold stared at the piece of paper, his mind going blank. A few days. The dinner recipe would be good for a few days. But Neal didn’t have any storage containers.

  
“Fuck,” Gold whispered. He thought about the preparation process - even if he didn’t have to store leftovers after, he’d still need at least two bowls just to make it. Unless he made the rice first and dumped it out on the paper plate, then made the soup. When it was done, it would be thick enough for them to eat it off plates, but he still needed the bowl to make it.

  
Gold closed his eyes again. Wal-Mart sold cheap sets of Tupperware - he could get a set of three for probably around $7. He hoped. He had never bought Tupperware before, always shying away at the price.

  
If necessary, he could cut something else out. Gold crossed out _1 microwaveable bowl - $5?_ and replaced it with _Tupperware set - $7-10_. He already felt like he’d spent too much money, and he hadn’t even been to the store yet. He’d have to get a job soon - he had a little under two thousand in his bank account, which would be enough to help Neal out with rent for the next month or two, but he was anxious to spend too much.

  
So he would keep the list short - if he ended up with enough money for lunchmeat, he’d buy it. If not, the chicken-and-rice could serve as two meals. It had done so plenty of times in the past.

  
He folded the list and stuffed into his shirt pocket, then scribbled out a note and left it on the fridge, pausing a moment to study Neal’s only magnet. It was kind of weird - some sort of swamp monster? Or maybe a tree monster? Probably from a comic book. God, he hoped it wasn’t from Neal’s webcomic - one, because Neal usually drew better monsters than that, and two, because Gold didn’t recognize it.

  
He shook his head, grabbed his cane, and headed out the door.

* * *

 

  
He got lost two times before he found a grocery store. Gold ducked inside quickly, hoping it would be less crowded than the sidewalk, but to his utter dismay, it seemed even more crowded. And this wasn’t even a Wal-Mart - he hadn’t been able to find one - which meant all his prices were probably inaccurate.

  
Gold ducked between people, making himself even smaller than usual. He had always hated grocery shopping, ever since he hurt his leg. If he got a basket, he had to let go of his cane to put things in it - or he could keep hold of his cane and put the basket on the ground. It was hard to say which was more awkward. If he got a cart, he couldn’t use his cane at all, and had to limp through the store with nothing but the meagre support of a shopping buggy.

  
Of course, there was the option of the motorized scooters, but if Gold stood to grab something off a shelf, there was always some asshole waiting to accuse him of faking it. And every time he thought of those things, he remembered the first time he went shopping with Milah after the accident, when she asked him loudly if he needed one or if he could walk, and everyone in the tiny rural grocery store had turned around and looked at Gold, their eyes going from Milah, to him, to his leg.

  
He grabbed a shopping basket.

 

* * *

 

  
It took Gold more than an hour to finish shopping, and his phone kept buzzing the entire time. The first time, Gold tried to ignore it, but the thought that it might be Neal calling finally overwhelmed him. But when he checked the caller ID, it didn’t say Neal, and it didn’t say Milah either. It was an unknown string of numbers glaring up at him.

  
Gold shoved it back in his pocket and tried to ignore it for the rest of the day. When he got to the kitchenware aisle, he was shocked to find a 24-piece set of Tupperware for only $10. Things had gotten cheaper since he was young, it seemed. Or maybe $10 had just seemed a lot bigger back then.

  
He managed to squeeze a loaf of bread and a thin package of turkey into the basket, watching anxiously as the cashier tallied it up. Gold tried not to let out an audible sigh of relief when it came up to $36.55. He handed over the cash, returning the cashier’s knowing smile with a weak grin of his own.

  
He needed to find a job. Maybe two. As Gold stepped out onto the street - still crowded as all hell - he craned his neck, searching for Help Wanted signs. His phone started buzzing again and Gold bit his lip, hoping it was still the unknown number. He didn’t have a hand free to answer it.

  
It stopped vibrating eventually, just as Gold ducked into a record store with blank applications stacked on the counter. He zigged and zagged the whole way home, constantly checking the time, always worrying about whether or not the turkey would spoil. He stopped at a bakery, a coffee shop, a bookstore, and even got a blank form shoved into his hands by a guy in a white van.

  
Gold furrowed his brow over each one, struggling to remember his new address and zip code. He tried to make his cane as inconspicuous as possible at every stop; the lady at the bookstore took one look at it and informed Gold, ‘regretfully,’ that if he got the job, he’d be handling a lot of stock.

  
“You sure you can handle it?” she asked. Gold just flushed, finishing the application and handing it in. He didn’t answer the question.

  
By the time he got home, his mood was at an all-time low. The sound of the elevator creaking up and down just made things worse; Gold stood before it, fear resting dully in his stomach. He wouldn’t be this scared of a fucking elevator most days, he was sure. It was all the sudden change - in the grocery store back home, the manager knew Gold and always sent a bag boy to help him with the cart. And of course, if he were applying for a job back home, he wouldn’t need to ask what his zip code was.

  
Gold shifted, the plastic grocery bag digging into his hand. His feet ached like he’d been walking all day instead of just a few hours. He wondered if Neal was even awake yet; if he was, how much would he judge Gold for going straight back to bed?

  
Probably a lot. Gold had rarely let Neal sleep late as a teenager; he’d wanted to, of course, ever since he read that article about teens needing more sleep than toddlers. But on Saturdays, Gold needed Neal’s help with whatever odd jobs they could find. They recycled, they chopped wood, they even drove Amish families around. Gold still felt guilty about all that; school these days was much harder than it had been when Gold was a boy, and Neal needed all the rest he could get. But they’d also needed the money, so …

  
Gold stepped into the Worst Elevator In The World and searched for his floor. The numbers on the buttons were all faded; he could make out a 1, and then … nothing, and then a 3, and then … nothing again. Well, at least he knew what it was supposed to be. He hovered near the doors, leaning heavily on his cane and waiting for the death trap to stop shaking as it brought him up to the fourth floor.

  
Gold shot out of the elevator as fast as he could when it finally stopped. He stumped down the hall to Neal’s apartment and set the grocery bag down to unlock the front door. Gold nudged the bag inside with his foot, following after.

  
“Hey, Dad,” Neal called from somewhere out of sight. Gold mumbled back a response, bending to fetch the bag and place it on the kitchen table. He started putting things away, running on autopilot. The bag was just starting to rip, and Gold was infinitely relieved that it hadn’t torn open while he was still outside.

  
A door opened and closed behind him, and Gold heard the soft sound of Neal shuffling across the floor in his socks. He turned to see Neal grabbing the cans of soup, placing them in the cupboard.

  
“What you gonna make?” Neal asked, studying the cans. Gold handed Neal the box of breakfast bars and Neal turned it this way and that, reading the label, before finally putting it back down on the counter. “Thanks,” he said.

  
“It’s breakfast,” said Gold patiently.

  
“Oh.” Neal tore the box open and grabbed two bars, peeling one open. “So what are you making?”

  
“Chicken and rice,” said Gold. He grabbed the Tupperware set from the bag and showed it to Neal before putting it away. “I got you some bowls.”

  
“Oh, I hate those,” said Neal, taking a bite of the breakfast bar. He spoke around a full mouth, gesturing with one hand. “I got a set of three last year and they’re so hard to wash. I ended up just throwing them away.”

  
Gold looked at his son in horror. “You threw them away?”

  
“Yeah,” said Neal. He smiled sheepishly. “I got some Rice-a-roni and put it one, but it didn’t taste good, so I just put it in the fridge for a while. Then it got moldy and I was like, no way I’m cleaning that, so --”

  
“Wait,” said Gold, his mind racing. “You ate Rice-a-roni? What do you mean?”

  
“Well--”

  
“Because what I’m _picturing_ ,” said Gold, “is you making an entire box of rice and not putting anything in it. Or seasoning it. And then throwing it away because it didn’t taste good.”

  
Neal winced. “Dad, you sound like you just caught me kicking a dog or something.”

  
Gold shook his head, already feeling bad. “Sorry,” he said. “Just … feeling stressed. Eat both of those, okay?” He pointed to the breakfast bars in Neal’s hand and got a startled nod. “I’m going back to bed.”

  
He pushed past Neal and was halfway to his bedroom when he heard Neal laugh.

  
“You’re going to bed?” he said. “It’s ten in the morning!”

  
“I didn’t sleep last night,” said Gold. He kept walking; as he crossed the threshold into his room, he realized Neal was following him.

  
“Mom called you?” Neal asked. Gold raised his eyebrows, grabbing his pajamas off the bed. He tossed his cane onto the mattress, too tired to try and balance it against the wall.

  
“She called you, too,” said Gold.

  
“Yeah,” said Neal. He brushed past Gold and grabbed the cane, setting it up carefully between the bed and the desk. “Asked me where you were.”

  
“I heard,” said Gold. He changed into his pajamas quickly; it was a relief not to worry when he did so anymore. Around Milah, there was always a cloud of tension in the air at bedtime. She would comment on his scar - or his physique - every time he changed, until he got so embarrassed that he started changing in the bathroom. Or worse, she would make a positive comment, a falsely-appreciative purr, and Gold would know she expected something when he came to bed.

  
Gold had expected that, with time, he would develop feelings for Milah. He always thought that, somewhere along the line, he’d grow to love her. But it had never happened - Milah was intelligent and funny and beautiful, and he was lucky she liked him, but he’d never really liked her back.

  
The first day they met, they’d both been in the military - Gold was a rank lower than Milah, though he’d been in for two years by then and she hadn’t even been in for one. It was a time between wars - Milah had joined for a free college education, and Gold had joined to get his citizenship. Gold was invited to lunch by an acquaintance he didn’t particularly like, and he only accepted because he didn’t know how to drive yet and couldn’t go anywhere on his own.

  
Milah had been invited, too. She’d spent the whole time cracking off-color jokes; some of them were original, but some of them Gold recognized from an Irish sitcom he’d seen a few years ago, a fact he decided to keep to himself. When they made it to the restaurant - a family-owned pho place - Milah asked Gold to marry her with an alarmingly serious undertone.

  
“If we get married,” she’d explained, “they have to give us a housing allowance, so neither of us would have to live in the barracks.”

  
“Right,” said Gold. He didn’t really need the explanation; half of his friends had already pulled this exact scheme, and one year after the fact, they were all divorced. Still, he was pretty sure Milah was joking - if she wasn’t to start with, she certainly was now. “Well, I wouldn’t mind getting married,” Gold said. “Did you want to try for today or wait ‘til the weekend? I’m not sure how fast we can get a marriage license...”

  
Milah laughed, a beautiful tinkling sound that made some of Gold’s tension melt away. She gave Gold a once-over, her eyes hooded and approving, and Gold felt his heart almost stop. She liked him. No one had ever liked him before and it seemed especially unlikely that someone would like him now, with his hair shorn short and his body wrapped in baggy camouflage.

  
He decided he really wouldn’t mind marrying her, even if it was just fo```r housing. Of course, he wasn’t actually going to. The idea made him uneasy - how far would the ruse go? Would she want to sleep together? Have sex? Gold was twenty years old and still hadn’t had his sexual awakening; he looked down at his pho and tried to put the idea out of his mind. Milah wouldn’t want to have sex with him; he had nothing good to offer.

  
As the meal came to an end, Milah loudly announced that she _never_ left tips - there was no point to it, since she was already paying for the food. A red flag went up in Gold’s mind, but he bit his tongue, leaving a sizeable amount of cash on the table when the other two had left. On the way home, Gold had just started to warm up to Milah again when she said, voice flippant, “I _love_ racist jokes!”

  
Gold stared at her for a moment, unsure if she was being sarcastic. The driver laughed and started in on a joke that gave Gold a headache; as Milah giggled, he turned toward the window, ignoring her request that he tell one, too. Gold was trying to resolve his feelings - the way his heart soared when Milah looked at him like he was handsome; the way his stomach plummeted when she said something horrible. She was young, though - they both were. And Milah had said at lunch that her parents were well off. She just hadn’t had a chance to grow yet; she had a different past than Gold, hadn’t had the same opportunities to learn.

  
Gold had no right to judge her. He remembered a book his father had got him when he was six - a book of so-called “sick” jokes about incest and murder. Gold had loved it; he’d spent years parroting it, always laughing if someone got offended. His ears turned red as he remembered it, familiar guilt creeping up on him.

  
Milah wasn’t an inherently bad person, Gold told himself. She was just … well, nineteen. That was all.

  
And she _liked_ him.

  
Gold shook his head, clearing away almost thirty years of memories. He sat down heavily on the bed and ignored Neal’s eyes.

  
“You gonna get a divorce?” Neal asked. Gold laid back, feeling winded from the question. He stared up at the ceiling, just able to see Neal’s silhouette in the periphery of his vision.

  
“I don’t know,” he said. “If she wants it. She has - well, if she wants to get married again, we’ll have to.”

  
“You think she does?” Neal asked, coming closer. “Want - want to get married again?”

  
Gold crossed his arms over his stomach, staring up at Neal. It was amazing how relaxed he felt right now; he usually hated to be in positions like this - lying down, with someone standing over him. He hated it with Milah, he hated it in the hospital. But Neal had always been Gold’s #1 Exception-to-the-Rule.

  
“Maybe,” Gold said, shrugging a little. He didn’t want to talk about Killian right now.

  
“Dad --” said Neal. The mattress shifted suddenly, creaking as Neal positioned himself, cross-legged, near Gold’s feet. “If you ever need to go back there for some reason, like - to get the rest of your things, or if you remember something you need --”

  
Gold was already shaking his head.

  
“-- don’t hesitate to ask, okay?” Neal said. “I can go with you and talk to Mom so she doesn’t - you know, do anything dumb. Okay?”

  
“I’m not going back,” said Gold. He tried to keep his voice even, unaffected, but a hint of indignation crept through.

  
“I know!” said Neal. “I meant for clothes and stuff, not to _be_ with her.”

  
Gold shrugged again, refusing to uncross his arms. He kept telling himself to kick Neal out so he could sleep, but it was hard to turn the thought into action. Neal clearly wanted to talk, and Gold didn’t want to upset him.

  
“Did she call you at all today?” Neal asked. Gold shifted a little, his bad ankle brushing against one of Neal’s hands; Neal instantly pulled away, not even seeming to think about it.

  
“I think so,” said Gold. “Someone did.”

  
“Unknown number?” asked Neal.

  
“Yeah.”

  
“Where’s your phone?”

  
Gold rolled over on his side and grabbed his jeans off the floor, digging through the pockets for his phone. He handed it to Neal, who turned it on and tapped away at the keyboard silently for a moment.

  
“Blocked it,” he announced, handing the phone back to Gold. Gold stared at the screen. “Blocked Mom too. Is that okay?”

  
“I - yeah,” Gold said. He blinked rapidly, feeling like a weight had come off his chest. “Thanks.”

  
“No problem,” said Neal. He hopped off the bed and started heading toward the door. “Just let me know if you need to contact her for something. Like divorce papers. You can borrow my phone.”

  
“She’ll know I’m staying here,” said Gold. His tone sounded like a warning.

  
“I know,” said Neal.

  
“You’ll get in trouble.”

  
Neal just shrugged. He gave Gold a small smile - Gold had seen sad smiles many times before, on many different people, but he never got used to seeing one on his son. It made his chest ache.

  
“I’ve been in trouble with her before,” Neal said. “There’s a reason I never told her exactly where I live.”

  
He ambled out of the room with a mumbled, “goodnight,” leaving Gold to think about how glibly Neal talked about Milah - like it was a normal thing for twenty-somethings to fear their mothers so much that they kept their addresses as secret. Well, no -- Gold corrected himself. Fear wasn’t quite the right word. Neal had never been afraid of Milah; he had always fought back when she was unfair to him, had never accepted her bad behavior. Gold didn’t know where he got it from - it had ended badly more than once, with Neal hiding away in his bedroom, crying.

  
Gold vividly remembered all those fights. When Neal turned fifteen, Milah had taken it upon herself to teach him how to drive. Neal still drove with Gold sometimes, but Milah didn’t like it - she insisted that all of Neal’s bad driving habits came from Gold. He drove too slow, he was annoyingly cautious. She wouldn’t have Neal turn out like his father - driving like a grandma instead of a man.

  
They’d come into the house, both simmering, and Milah had started yelling at Neal before he could even set his bookbag down. Gold hadn’t been able to glean much from the conversation; later he found out that Neal had ‘disrespected’ Milah by disobeying her order to park in the sixteenth parking spot outside Wal-Mart - he had accidentally parked in the fifteenth one instead.

  
Neal had been, as always, as polite as possible while Milah shouted at him, though he also always made the mistake of explaining his point of view. There was no way to explain one’s point of view to Milah without being seen as argumentative. She’d gone berserk, first accusing Neal of being spoiled, then trying the “poor me” route and asking why he treated her like Grandma and Grandpa (who were, in Milah’s mind, the worst people to ever live). In the end, she’d grounded Neal for a month, banning him from seeing his girlfriend.

  
Neal had stayed in the kitchen, quiet and composed, for as long as he could before heading up to his room. Ever since Neal was seven, Milah liked to draw arguments out by accusing him of pouting and/or “crying about it” in his room. Which, granted, really was what Neal was doing.

  
Gold waited about ten minutes before following Neal to his bedroom. Neal’s room was a hodgepodge of ugly decorating choices - the carpet was rainbow shag, the walls were wood paneling, and the curtains had an odd Western theme. There were handmade arrows - Gold had made them when Neal was eleven, during his archery phase - sticking out of the Styrofoam ceiling tiles, and different art projects scattered around so thickly it was hard to walk.

  
Neal was sitting on his bed, his face red, trying not to cry. Gold grabbed the desk chair and pulled it up across from his son.

  
Some days, Gold knew what to say to Neal to make him feel better. But ever since last year - since an incident he thought of only in pictures and fragmented sounds, not in words - Neal had had a hard time looking his father in the eye.

  
So they sat there, neither of them knowing what to say, both of them hating Gold for not speaking up when the argument was still going on.

  
That’s just the way it was.


	5. Emma

When Gold woke up, the clock read 6:13 and daylight was dwindling. He rubbed his eyes, stretching for a few minutes in utter silence before he headed out of his bedroom, still wearing his pajamas. If Neal had already eaten dinner, Gold would postpone chicken-and-rice for a day - no point in making it if he was the only one eating it. He tromped toward the bathroom and then froze, suddenly registering the sound of a woman’s voice in the apartment.

_ Milah _ \- no, this voice was American. Gold relaxed marginally, then looked down at his clothes. Neal had a friend over - he ought to go change. Gold could imagine Neal’s embarrassment if he was trying to impress a girl while his dad banged around the apartment wearing flannel pants and a Haunted Mansion t-shirt.

_ I haven’t even been on Haunted Mansion _ , Gold thought in distress.  _ I look like an utter fraud _ .

He turned on his heel, determined to go back to his room and put on his nicest clothes. And maybe clean the apartment up a little, too. But before he could, he heard the woman’s voice, suddenly sounding a lot clearer.

“Is that your dad?”

Gold froze.

“Oh, god,” Neal said, a smile in his voice. “He’s wandering around in his pajamas.”

“Does he … is he sick or something?”

Gold turned around again, eyebrows raised, to see Neal and a blonde woman standing just outside Neal’s room, staring at him.

“No, he’s not sick,” Neal said to the girl before raising his voice to address Gold. “Dad, are you wearing my Haunted Mansion shirt?” He didn’t give Gold a chance to answer. “Emma, get this, Dad was too scared to even go on that ride, he waited outside and watched the parade.”

“You wanted to go with Killian!” said Gold indignantly. Neal snorted.

“Yeah, because you said you weren’t going.”

Gold’s mouth opened and closed; he was too offended at being attacked ad hominem by his own son to come up with anything to say.

Luckily, the kids had already forgotten him.

“Definitely start working on your panels more,” Emma said, turning to Neal. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder and looked like she was getting ready to go. “I don’t read a lot of comics but I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to have, like, a million panels the exact same size and shape in a row.”

“Right,” Neal said. He was blushing; at least Gold wasn’t the only one getting embarrassed today.

“See ya later,” Emma said. She waved at Gold and he waved back too late for her to see; she had already left. He looked down at himself, wondering if he should still change. Milah hated when he lounged around in pajamas - but Neal was wearing basketball shorts and a tank top, so Gold figured it didn’t really matter.

“I, uh …” Neal cleared his throat. He gestured at the front door, then let his hand drop uselessly to his side. “Emma’s … one of my friends. From school.”

Gold raised his eyebrows. “She’s an artist?” he asked. Emma didn’t look like Neal’s artsy friends - he was pretty sure her hair was a natural color, not dyed, and there had been no paint stains on her clothes at all. Not to mention her clothes themselves had been extraordinarily normal. 

“Uh, no,” Neal said. “She - she didn’t actually go to school with me, I just met her there. By accident. She’s a bounty hunter.”

Gold nodded, deciding not to question that. He looked around for something else to talk about, his eyes landing on the kitchen cupboards.

“Have you eaten yet?” he asked. 


	6. The Honeymoon Period

Over the next few weeks, Gold did his best to ignore the sound of Emma’s voice - whether she be offering Neal advice for his comic (“Have you considered adding a murder?”) or making unholy moaning noises in Neal’s bed late at night. Gold made it a habit to leave the apartment whenever Emma came by. He went to the library a few blocks away, signing up for a card and using their computers to print off a stack of resumes.

He hadn’t heard back from any of the jobs he applied to; Gold decided that was because he’d filled out so many applications while he was running on 48 hours without sleep. He probably hadn’t even written his number down right. So whenever Emma came over, Gold walked the streets of New York, ducking into every business he could find to hand over his resume.

There was a company left over from the recession that helped out-of-work New Yorkers find temporary jobs. Gold had contacted them shortly after his arrival in the city, and he’d worked at a pretzel factory for two days last week, giving him enough pocket money to justify not going home for lunch. He found a relatively cheap coffee shop and sat there, ensconced in the corner with his resumes paper-clipped together, nursing a cup of hot chocolate.

The librarian here in town was brilliant. She had seen Gold struggling with the computers and had just  _ known _ he needed help, without even asking. She’d helped him type everything up, shown him how to Google things he couldn’t remember - who knew there was information about him online? - and even helped him set up an email address so he could keep a copy of his resume without having to type it up afresh every few days.

He sipped his hot chocolate and glanced around the cafe, wondering if maybe someday he’d recognize the people milling around inside. He figured it was doubtful; New York was a grand sight bigger than the tiny town he and Milah had been living in. But still, he was collecting a  _ few _ familiar faces. There was the barista, Graham, an Irishman who loved to chat with Gold about all things coffee - and even more, loved to trash-talk the English. And there was the young brunette, Ruby, who had offered Gold a job application for what seemed like a ripoff of Meals on Wheels.

Then there was the librarian. A beautiful accent, a stunningly sharp tongue, and a quick mind. Gold guessed she was in her early thirties, placing her closer to Neal’s age than to Gold’s. He wondered if Neal would like her, if things with Emma didn’t work out. And Gold had a sinking feeling they wouldn’t; he’d come home yesterday to the sound of Emma and Neal bickering, and had been forced to leave for another hour until they tired themselves out.

He hoped she was nothing like Milah. Neal didn’t deserve to bounce straight from an abusive parental relationship to an abusive romantic one - and even more, he hoped  _ Neal _ was nothing like Milah. Gold straightened his stack of resumes and took a nervous sip of hot chocolate, suddenly unable to sit still. 

He’d always thought the worst possible thing would be for Neal to turn out like his father - weak, inadequate, spineless. But he’d visited Neal at his dorm just two years ago, and there had been a self-help book about dealing with abusive parents sitting on the counter. After an initial moment of panic and overwhelming guilt, Gold had realized he probably wasn’t the parent Neal was thinking about when he purchased that book.

He still remembered flipping through it, reading a few lines that had been highlighted in yellow. Set phrases jumped out at him -  _ constant criticism, the honeymoon period, gaslighting _ . But the section with the most highlights was a small part of one chapter that addressed the myth that abused children grow up to be abusers. Gold couldn’t help being comforted by that chapter, for his own sake as much as Neal’s.

He didn’t know what he’d do if Neal turned out like Milah. They’d shared so many traits when Neal was a teenager, especially after ….

Gold took a quick drink of hot chocolate, his hand shaking so bad that he almost upended the drink on himself. He needed to stop thinking about these things. Milah had finally stopped calling, and she had no idea where he was - he could stop worrying.

Easier said than done, of course. Gold stood and made his way through the crowded cafe, placing his empty mug down in a tray labeled Dirty Dishes, right next to the counter. On his way back past his regular table, he grabbed the stack of resumes and tucked them under his arm, ready for another long day of job-hunting.


	7. Brewed Awakening

Gold felt his phone vibrating in his pocket a moment before it stopped ringing. He dug it out, staring at the screen - one missed phone call. And then, a moment later: one new voicemail.

Voicemail? Gold stared at the unknown number on the screen, suddenly feeling like he might throw up. She was calling him from yet another phone - maybe Killian’s, maybe a friend’s. Or maybe she’d bought a new phone altogether. Either way, Gold knew he shouldn’t acknowledge it. He had left Milah four times before, and each time he’d come crawling back, usually because he’d made the mistake of reading a letter or listening to a voicemail.

Still … what if she was calling to apologize? Gold didn’t have to go back. He never  _ had _ to. But it would be nice to hear it - he could live out the rest of his life without her, knowing she was sorry. It would be a dream come true.

Gold still hesitated. A part of him knew he had already lost the fight. He made his way into the apartment building, where it was significantly quieter, and held the phone to his ear. There was a crackling, staticky noise before the voicemail started.

“Mr. Gold, this is Greg Davis from Brewed Awakening.”

Gold’s mind stuttered, his thoughts becoming disjointed. Brewed Awakening? Had he heard that right? What the hell was a --

“We looked over your application and we’d like you to come in for an interview on the 21st at one p.m. That’s one in the afternoon, Monday the twenty-first, okay? See you then.”

Brewed Awakening. Gold’s heart leapt. It was one of the cafes he’d applied to a few weeks ago. In fact, it was the cafe he’d completely  _ forgotten _ he’d applied to, because it had become, in his mind, simply the place he went to for hot chocolate every day. 

He stared at the phone, unsure what to think. It had been  _ weeks _ since he applied. He’d thought they’d already filled the position. 

Gold made his way toward the elevator, thinking hard. He’d been chatting with the baristas lately, when the shop wasn’t busy - especially with Graham. Asking about their preferred brewing techniques, their favorite single-origin. He hadn’t been trying to establish himself as a coffee aficionado or anything; it was just that he wasn’t sure what else to talk to baristas about. Had those small talks somehow set him apart?

Gold wrinkled his brow; when the elevator stopped, he drifted down his hallway and into the apartment like a ghost. He’d had a lot of jobs in his lifetime, but it was still strange to him when he … well, actually got one. It always felt like he’d duped his bosses, somehow - tricked them into accepting the worst candidate for the job.

“Neal?” Gold called. He didn’t get an answer; there was a pile of mail on the card table in the kitchen, including two rejection letters for Neal. Gold examined the envelopes, amazed that any real business put cartoon characters on their stationery. 

So Neal’s internship request had been turned down again. Gold scanned the letters, looking for the company name. Marvel? Well, that was a stupid name. Gold unfolded the letters, frowning in the direction of Neal’s bedroom. He hoped Neal wasn’t taking it too hard - the boy had plenty of time and opportunities left. He was young, educated, talented, hardworking, and - most importantly - single and child-less.

Gold turned his attention to the letters again. Neal had applied for a student internship … last year, when he was still in school.

Well, it was good to know Gold wasn’t the  _ only _ one getting job information extremely late. He set the letters back down and headed for the fridge, checking the five takeout menus Neal had stuck to it with magnets. They couldn’t really afford takeout - but Gold had possibly just landed a new job, and Neal was probably feeling down. 

Gold read over the prices, doing calculations in his head. They could do Thai food. He pulled his phone out and started thumbing in the number, then paused, staring at the Voicemail button. Gold scratched his nose as he thought - would it be …  _ odd _ of him to listen to it again? Just because?

Did it really matter? He clicked on the voicemail from Brewed Awakening, trying to memorize the words as he heard them. Gold bit down on the inside of his cheeks in an effort to check his smile - years ago, during a brief period before Neal was born when he and Milah were separated, he and a boyfriend had taken a community college class all about making espresso. It had been surprisingly fun - maybe that was just nostalgia talking, but Gold didn’t think so. He knew he was about twice the age of the typical barista, but he couldn’t  _ wait _ to start work.

 

* * *

 

Gold stood behind the counter in what Brewed Awakening considered an acceptable uniform - a white shirt and jeans. He’d had to buy the white shirt, actually; Milah had made a fuss, ten years ago, about Gold messing up her clothes by doing laundry incorrectly (exactly how, he still wasn’t sure) and she’d insisted he use the local laundromat for his things from then on. Eazy-Cleen got all its water from a well out back, typical for a small town, but the water was a rusty color and tended to slowly turn light clothes yellow, then orange, then red.

Gold had stopped buying white clothing years ago. He hadn’t even realized that he could start buying them again until he was told about uniform standards during his interview. Then his head had started spinning, rocketing between classy things he’d seen in shop windows - this nice linen shirt, for one - to shitty things from clearance boxes, like that Seinfeld t-shirt, or the pair of distressed skinny jeans that looked like something Neal would have worn in 2007.

Gold amused himself for a few minutes thinking of Neal’s scene phase, At least the boy had had a sense of style, though, and he pulled it off, as much as one could pull off a scene look. Throughout high school, Gold’s wardrobe had consisted of two XL concert t-shirts (hand-me-downs from the priest who ran the group home), an unfashionable pair of jeans, and a black windbreaker with a local bar logo on the back.

It still made him blush to think of his senior year, when a sweet freshman had come to school with her backpack full of her brother’s old clothes. She’d cornered him in the art room - not the main room full of working students, but the empty back room full of supplies - and asked if he wanted any. She framed the question so politely, pretending that she liked Gold’s B.B. King t-shirt too much to see it ruined by paint and clay. The clothes she’d brought, she’d said, would make good work clothes for ceramics class.

Gold didn’t know which was more embarrassing - that she’d noticed him wearing the same two outfits every day or that she’d apparently watched him struggling with the wheel in Ceramics. 

She was incredibly nice about it, and Gold didn’t want to hurt her feelings by saying no, but he’d said yes to someone once before - in middle school - and when the other students saw his new clothes and recognized them as hand-me-downs, it had been worse than any of the bullying he got for just having two t-shirts.

And he really shouldn’t be thinking about things like this during the breakfast rush. Gold shook his head and started paying closer attention to the orders. He smiled at each customer as charmingly as he could; to his dismay, his cheeks were sore within the hour. 

He hadn’t smiled this much in ages.


	8. New Directions

Milah wouldn’t stop speeding. Gold clutched at the door handle, his eyes glued to the road. There was a sharp turn up ahead, with another car coming ‘round it. Milah wouldn’t see in time. They’d crash.

How did he know that? Didn’t matter. He kept begging Milah to stop but she snapped at him, made him feel bad, and the whole time they were speeding toward that curve, Gold’s stomach curling into knots.

“Milah, please slow down.”

“I’m not even speeding, Ian,” Milah said, but the speedometer read 85, so she was, and this was a country road, not the highway, and that curve was -

Gold’s eyes snapped open, his heart thudding against his chest. For thirty seconds, he lay perfectly still beneath the covers, eyes adjusting, mind collecting details of the bedroom to convince him he wasn’t still in the speeding car.

God. The Speeding Car Dream. Gold sat up, his limbs trembling from leftover adrenaline. He felt like he’d just sprinted all the way home and back, and he knew from experience that he wasn’t going to get anymore sleep.

He groped around for his cane and a sweater, pulling the latter over his head without checking if it was right-side-out first. Gold made his way out to the kitchen, trying to think of something to do. The librarian had given him a list of books she recommended, and Gold had checked a few of them out. For some reason, Belle (because of course her name was Belle, because the universe seemed to have no subtlety lately) seemed to think he was a big poetry person - she hadn’t included a single book of prose on her list, and Gold had wound up choosing  _ No Planets Strike _ , a book with far too many poems about zombies, to read first.

He picked it up idly, sitting on Neal’s scratchy, burlap-covered couch. Gold was using his library receipt as a bookmark; it had a phone number written on it in Belle’s handwriting, and Gold assumed she had tucked it into his book by accident. He would return it to her next week, when he was done with the books.

Gold turned on the dim, garage-sale lamp next to him and made it through two poems before realizing that the rhythm of the words had lulled him into a trance. He had no idea what he’d just read. 

He briefly considered turning on the TV - but there was nothing he wanted to watch, and the sound might wake Neal. Gold sighed and lifted himself off the couch, glancing around the apartment for something to do. His eyes landed on a loose pile of papers on the card table in the kitchen; Neal had been working there during dinner.

Gold tiptoed across the floor slowly, setting his cane down with care on every step. It barely made a sound. He sifted through the papers - there were character sketches, photos of what looked like different lakeside neighborhoods, pencil-written outlines of the story. Gold’s fingers hesitated over a printout Neal had made of backgrounds - there were a few shapeless trees in one panel, and a cramped bike trail in the other. 

Gold felt a pang of regret - Neal’s landscapes were beautiful, when he had the time and space to make them. It must be horrible, doing all this work on his own - plotting the story and the panels, drawing everything, writing the dialogue. 

Gold bit his lip, glancing between the backgrounds and the photos Neal had printed. He could find a detailed outline of the webcomic in Neal’s room. He set the papers down, shuffling them into a neater pile, and headed toward Neal’s bedroom door. Gold eased it open one inch at a time, leaving his cane outside for maximum silence. 

He knew Neal didn’t draw with a pencil and paper anymore; he used a slim computer that was smaller than the poetry book Belle had given him, and a pen that didn’t actually have any ink. Gold snatched both those things, along with Neal’s laptop, and carried them back into the kitchen.

Now he had the daunting task of learning how to draw electronically. Gold had experimented with art styles a lot in his younger years - in the Army, he’d spent a grand majority of his spare change at arts-and-crafts stores, migrating from pastel portraits of his friends to elaborate ink drawings to watercolor covers for his favorite books.

He’d stopped drawing, for the most part, when he started dating Milah. Every few months, he’d get an idea and buy the supplies for it, but unless it was an automaton, he wasn’t likely to finish it. Milah had liked to draw as well, though her talents had differed significantly from Gold’s. Between the two of them and their abandoned projects, Neal had never lacked art supplies.

But Gold had never drawn with a tablet. He’d saved up his money to buy Neal one, when he was in high school, and Gold had watched his son work with it, but he’d never used one himself. Still, if anyone could force Gold into the world of technology, it was Neal. Gold had used the Internet for the first time specifically so he could make a Deviantart account and favorite his son’s Harry Potter drawings.

He turned the tablet on and got to work.


End file.
